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Cracker offers site defacement service

Will Knight ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 02 Jan 2001 16:10 GMT

A cracker known for defacing UK Web sites has launched a scheme that lets anyone take part in Web graffiti.

The cracker -- known as Evil Angelica -- offered last week to post by requests sent in an email message on future compromised Web sites.

"Are you too brainless to hack a website? Scared the feds might catch you? Would you like to be the envy of all you friends? Would you like to be a l33t h4x0r [elite hacker]?" asks the Web page vandal in a Christmas defacement.

"Design a cool web defacement, using your own name or group, zip it up with all the images and send it to me."

Although page defacements do not necessarily mean that valuable data has been compromised, they can do considerable damage to a company's reputation.

Peter Sommer, a research fellow at the London School of Economics specialising in computer crime, says it is getting easier and easier to carry out this sort of attack. "One must accept that as the knowledge of how to do this and the tools become more widely available, it is going to become more common," he says.

Sommer agrees that page defacements are increasingly becoming a soapbox for those with a message to get across and points to the conflict in the Middle East which has been accompanied by attacks on a number of political sites.

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